Chop Sockey! Kung Fu Wargame Miniature Rules playtest

Chop Sockey -Kung Fu Miniature Wargame Rules is one of my current works in progress. The goal was to create a set of rules that would be simple and fun to play while allowing for the flexibility needed to recreate the battle action of a classic kung fu movie or comic book. While much work remains to be done, we had our first real test play, and the basic concepts seem to work surprisingly well. 

Troops and characters are divided into four classes: minions, fighters, warriors, and heroes. 

Minions are those mobs of virtually useless combatants who get mown down by the dozen when the hero enters the room. 

Fighters and warriors are more ordinary people with the warriors being a step up from the fighters. Picture your elite samurai or commando-types and you have the basic idea. 

Heroes, well, heroes are heroes, except of course the heores who are really villains, and regardless highly skilled in kung fu and other deadly arts. They dominate the game, but that's the way it should be.

Close combat is handled by rolling large quantities of dice and comparing the difference in the die rolls. Aside from no hit at all, the results can be a hit, a deadly hit, or a spectacular hit. A spectacular hit is so frightening that it causes enemies to check morale. 

A long view of the set up for the game. At one of the table, you can see a jungle stockade where bandits have been holding women and children as prisoners. They are being held by an arch villain (a hero in game terms) and two five man units of bandits with sub-machine guns (fighters) and two five man bands of traitorous peasants (minions) who have allied themselves with the  bandits and their villainous yet highly skilled leader.

On the other side, are three bands of peasant militia (fighters), one with rifles and two with spears. They are led by three heroes and two native guides (specialists rated as warriors). Their goal is to cross the river, storm the stockade and rescue the prisoners.  

Another view of the set up. 

The evil bandits and their prisoners.

The good guys, come to rescue the prisoners.

The prisoners.

 A close up of the mountain bandits. These are Westwind's Montagniards (delightfully inaccurate Montagniards by the way) from their Vietnam range.

The game ended in a clear victory by the good guys who destroyed the villains and easily won the game. While some rules and stats need to be tweaked, 

Roman gladiator gaming at Council of Five Nations 2016

Historical miniature gaming has been a hobby of mine since college or earlier. A few years ago, I became interesting in Roman gladiator conflicts and other arena events as a focus for wargaming. I soon painted up some figures, created a model arena, and found a set of rules and ran a few games. One of these was at a local convention called The Council of the Five Nations. These are photos of that game.

I used a set of rules called Red Sand, Blue Sky from a company called Two Hour Wargames. Although I have since moved on to a different set of rules for the period, Hoc, Habet, Hoc from Flagship Games, I had several interesting games with this set of rules although ultimately I found them a bit too mechanical and limited for my tastes. In these rules each turn requires that the players determine initiative and then each gladiator engages in a sequence of actions. To mark which player moved his figure when, a sequence that shifted each turn and depended on the characters' abilities as well as a random dice roll, poker chips with numbers were used.

The players conduct their moves.

Here you can see part of the game, four gladiators, two heavily armored Myrmillo and two lightly armored Retarii armed with a net and trident pair off for battle. This was a historically authentic match.

You can see here that the order of play is determined and marked with the numbered Poker Chips.

A Myrmillo manuevers to attack a retarius from the flank.

The Retarius has thrown his net and missed. It lies nex to a heavily armored Myrmillo making recovery of the net difficult. Can the lightly armored gladiator survive the match?

I've run the game again in 2017 and will be running it again this year in 2018 using a new set of rules (Hoc, Habet, Hoc) and also having upgraded and improved my arena. I look forward to showing more photos of the result.

Gwar Miniatures

This blog is intended to be about history and historical miniature wargaming, from time to time, when the miniatures are there, non-historical wargame miniatures will be featured. Or is Gwar, the surreal speed metal band of the 1990s and beyond somehow history?  (the band has been performing for over thirty years, since 1984, but still performs today although the line-up has changed with the death and retirement of different band members as well as the characters they portray.)

Three band members of the 1990s in 28mm scale miniature, from Left to Right, Oderus Orungus, Balsac -the Jaws of Death, and Beefcake the Mighty  (All figures on this blog were painted by yours truly.)

More 1990s era Gwar band members in 28mm miniature. From Left to Right. Flattus Maximus, Slymenstra Hymen, and Jizmak the Gusha. These three and the above figures were the band line-up at the time the figures were released. 

According to its own mythos and band background materials,  Gwar had originally been a band of galactic mercenaries and space pirates called "The Scum Dogs of the Universe." They had come to Earth millennia ago, killed the dinosaurs, destroyed Atlantis, and accidentally set the template for the Roman Empire when primitive humans had copied Beefcake the Mighty. Ultimately, however, the Scumdogs of the Universe had become frozen for centuries in the icy wastes of Antarctica. 

Somehow Sleazy P. Martini, down-on-his-luck band manager, stumbled across them, thawed them out, and convinced them to form a band and create music and bloody spectacles for the people of late 20th Century Earth. 

Sleazy P. Martini, band manager extroadinairre

The result has to be seen to be understood. As someone once wrote, "skip the recorded music. Just go to the videos." 

And thusly I offfer you . . . 

I saw them live myself twice in the 1990s and even wrote a write up and review of the show in a local publication called The Source, --not to be confused with the later hip-hop publication, the source. You find a copy here: https://web.archive.org/web/20030905065751fw_/http://capital.net:80/~phuston/GWAR1.html

In the 1990s, a company called Demon Blade Miniatures released the Gwar Miniature and Role Playing Game (really a miniature skirmish game) and it included a rule book and the above figures (minus Sleazy P. Martini who had to be bought separately) and many figures to represent the Gwar Slaves. Mindless and unimportant human scum who the band brought with them from place to place to work as roadies or be killed on stage for the entertainment of the crowd,

Gwar Slaves in 28mm scaled. 

The Rule Book

Of course, a band needs opponents to fight. One of these was Cardinal Syn, a giant robot who worked with the Morality Squad, a group that, within the mythos, tried to put an end to Gwar and force the closure of their stupid and gratuitously violent shows. Sometimes during a Gwar show these enemies of Gwar would invade the show and need to be dispatched in a violent fashion as fake blood sprayed all over the audience.

Cardinal Syn and Oderus Orungus in 28mm scale.

Other enemies of Gwar of the period included 

Enemies of Gwar in 28mm scale, from Left to Right Scroda Moon, Techno-destructo, and the Sexecutioner. 

The figures and the rule book are now long out of print and fetch collectors prices on ebay. Exactly how this strange range of miniatures came to be is uncertain, but rumor (unconfirmed rumor) had it that one of the band members took a job sculpting figures for Demon Blade Games (a company that has closed its doors sadly) and this range grew out of that collaboration. Regardless, it's kind of cool how the Gwar Miniatures range was released and thus the world became a little more interesting.